Small pieces of evidence dropped by the Ripple team last year has led to speculation that Ripple could be partnering with the international companies Amazon and Uber. These rumors come off the back of the huge year Ripple had in 2017, where they partnered with a number of institutions including 63 banks in asia and three of the top five money transfer companies in the world. After this performance, it makes sense that investors think Ripple could be about to close some huge deals in 2018.
The Rumors
Last December, the chief cryptographer for Ripple, David Schwartz, let it slip that there were two huge Ripple partnerships coming up that he wasn’t able to name. He added that these companies were not just banks, like many of their other partnerships, but they were household names.
David later implied in a tweet that he shouldn’t even have mentioned that two household names were partnering with Ripple. He stated that Brad Garlinghouse, the Ripple CEO, should have yelled at him for revealing the upcoming partnerships. It’s possible that David dropped too big of a hint that pushed the limits on some non-disclosure agreements that Ripple had signed.
Ripple investors were quick to search for clues after hearing about these big partnerships. In a Ripple conference from November 2017, which is publicly viewable on YouTube, a slide can be seen which shows Amazon, Uber, and Seagate as examples of companies which could utilize Ripple’s xVia payment system.
Using Seagate in this presentation makes sense, as we know from the “about” section on the Ripple website that Seagate is a Ripple investor; they invested 83 million USD in the Ripple company over 2015 and 2016. Amazon and Uber, though? There is no known connection between them and Ripple. They could have been specifically picked to make a point about the potential scale of the xVia system, but Ripple could have just as easily used more of their known investors, one of which is Google. With big names like Google to use for further examples, the reason Ripple chose Amazon and Uber may be due to links they have through partnerships that have not yet been announced.
Benefits of Partnering with Ripple
Even though partnerships with Amazon and Uber haven’t been announced yet, it is easy to see why these companies would want to work with Ripple. Using the Ripple payment system would allow for all payments, even international ones, to be sent in the cheapest and quickest way currently possible. For international companies like Amazon and Uber, up to 1.6 trillion USD worldwide is spent every year on processing international payments. These companies must fund multiple bank accounts with various currencies to be able to send and receive payments in those currencies. This means having a large amount of capital sitting around, and paying huge operational fees for each bank account.
Using XRP as an intermediate solves this problem. With the Ripple payment system, payments made in any currency are converted to Ripple XRP and sent to a single US bank account, where they are then converted to USD. Along with drastically reducing costs, transactions would only take 4 seconds to settle. This is much quicker than the model currently used by Amazon and Uber for international payments, which takes 3-5 days to process transactions.
Whether Ripple partners with Amazon and Uber or not, you can tell that they’re going to have a big year. Their cryptocurrency-based payment system is already making waves, and it’s only going to get more popular. If you haven’t invested in Ripple yet, there’s still time; Ripple is only just getting started. Follow this guide if you’re unsure how to buy Ripple XRP. And if you want to see even more reasons to jump on board, take a look at these three reasons why you should invest in Ripple XRP.
The names David Schwartz was taking about was Money gram and Western Union.